Dr.
Hagelin spoke with DEMOCRACY IN ACTION after moderating a Congressional
Prevention Caucus forum "Stress Prevention: Its Impact on Health
and Medical Savings" in the Longworth House Office Building on June 24,
1998.

What is your first political
memory?

Was there someone along the
way there, who was helpful in getting you to learn the ropes?

What do you remember most
about that first campaign in 1992…?

Americans seem disengaged
from the political process. Do you see this as a problem and how should
it be addressed?

Do you have a framework or
a formula for looking at the role of the federal government?

The Natural Law Party places
a strong emphasis on transcendental meditation, which doesn't really have
roots in American political culture. The party may be seen as somewhat
alien to American political culture. Do you agree with that?

What is your first political
memory?

My first political memory
was sitting in Iowa with a bunch of frustrated people in Iowa. This is
right after Bush and Clinton had secured their presidential nominations
in 1992, and a lot of people were scratching their heads, saying we should
be able to do better than this. And that was the birth of the Natural Law
Party and I was its first presidential candidate back in 1992. That was
my first act of political involvement--was to run for president.

…How about when you were
a kid…?

I recall my mother once when
I was quite young, probably nine or ten years old…I asked about politics
and she said don't go into it, it's a dirty business. And I hadn't paid
much attention to politics until, as a scientist, I became increasingly
aware of solutions that were clearly scientifically beneficial and scientifically
based that were simply being ignored by government. And I thought why is
that? I learned a little bit about government functions, how campaigns
are financed, how elections are waged, and I came to the conclusion that
the wrong influences are controlling government decisions and that's when
I really started to get interested and ultimately involved in the Natural
Law Party and its birth.

Was there someone along
the way there, who was helpful in getting you to learn the ropes?

When I decided to run as
a candidate for a third party, I quickly spoke to my congressman and my
friends here and on Capitol Hill and everybody I could who knew anything
about how the system worked. And I found that actually as a third party
candidate it was much more difficult and much more complicated than even
being a Republican or Democratic candidate. I had to find millions of people
willing to sign a signature to put me on the ballot in fifty states. It
takes 35 times as many signatures to get on the ballot if you run as non-Republican
or non-Democrat. So there's a lot we had to learn, and we ended up suing
the Federal Election Commissions and the debates commissions and changing
election laws governing ballot access and debates in many states, I think
for the benefit of democracy as a whole. Opening up the political process
so libertarians and other voices of all kinds could be heard.

But did you have mentor,
someone who you looked up to?

Not at the time, really.
There were political figures that captured my imagination. John F. Kennedy,
I thought was an inspired leader and of course Abraham Lincoln and Thomas
Jefferson stand out in my mind as being truly inspired political leaders
and political thinkers, but recently, as I said, politics was not a main
issue in my life. I'm a research physicist; I was involved with research
in cosmogenesis--understanding the physics of elementary particles and
writing papers on unified quantum field theories before I left my ivory
tower and really got my hands and feet dirty out there on the campaign
trail.

What do you remember most
about that first campaign in 1992…?

Yes, I call it the agonies
and ecstasies of the campaign. Some of the agonies were being excluded
from debates, for example--presidential debates--even though we jumped
through hoops that were put in our way by the so-called debates commission.
We satisfied all of their objective criteria for participation and that
didn't make any difference; they really didn't want us on. And it was really
just a decision made between the two leading candidates of the two main
parties as to who would debate, when they would debate, what they would
ask. So that's an agony. Another agony is facing ballot access obstacles
that are just so impossible. For example to get on the ballot in Florida
requires more signatures than the entire continent of Europe as well as
New Zealand and Australia and many other countries combined. So no one's
ever done it except Ross Perot as a third party candidate, and that was
tough.

Some of the ecstasies
were actually getting the message out. A USA Today insert carried
our 16-page platform to 6 million readers. That was in '96, but similar
breakthroughs with good shows, national media coverage, when it would come,
was very satisfying because when people would hear about what we were doing,
almost always they were inspired to participate, to write, to send e-mail
letters of support and so forth.

When you were running
in 92 you were driving around the country or how did that go?

Yes we don't have Air Force
One, you see, so our travelling is done by plane and bus and automobile.
And my vice presidential running mate Dr. Mike Tompkins also put in a year's
travel by bus, plane, train and automobile. It was a low-budget campaign.
But what we relied upon entirely is grassroots support from the people
and the hundreds of candidates who jumped on the bandwagon. By 1996 we
had almost 500 candidates running for federal, state and local offices
and that was a major grassroots uprising which is continuing to grow today.

Americans seem disengaged
from the political process. Do you see this as a problem and how should
it be addressed?

I see it as a symptom, a
symptom of the fact that the Republicans and Democrats are not presenting
to them any new solutions really, and the same problems of escalating crime
and certainly spiraling health costs, and declining health, environmental
problems… There just…new solutions aren't there. So yes people are disengaged.
They don't see why it's worth taking a day off of work to vote even sometimes.
You've got the lowest voter turnout of any democracy in the world. What
we found with the Natural Law Party was because it was a fresh approach
and because it offered manifestly effective commonsense and humane solutions
to problems that have not gone away, people became very engaged. The campuses
got very engaged. A half of our registered voters in California--we have
about 125,000 registered Natural Law Party members in California alone--half
of them are students. So it really shows a re-awakening of political interest
among the youth who otherwise see no reason to get involved with the current
political negative campaigning and political process as it stands today.

Do you have a framework
or a formula for looking at the role of the federal government?

Yes, I believe government
has a role--in that sense I'm not really a libertarian--government has
a role in helping society fulfill its purpose, which is the progress and
happiness of its members. And as long as government is helping, playing
that coordinating role in society by helping citizens be all they can be,
to grow as individuals, and fulfill their life purposes, then there's a
role for government.

Natural Law Party government
especially is concerned with the development of full human potential--
giving the citizens of the country all the education and developmental
technologies, including meditation technologies, that they need in order
to realize their full human potential. And that in the long run is the
solution to all our national problems. Because if we're only using, typically,
5-percent of our God-given potential, then we're creating all kinds of
otherwise avoidable problems; we're electing 5-percent politicians to concoct
5-percent solutions to these 5-percent problems. It's a tremendously expensive
and inefficient enterprise. So government can be much better, but the way
government will become better is by the population also rising in their
own higher stages of human development through the sorts of programs and
educational technologies that the Natural Law Party promotes.

The Natural Law Party
places a strong emphasis on transcendental meditation, which doesn't really
have roots in American political culture. The party may be seen as somewhat
alien to American political culture. Do you agree with that?

I agree that some people
might see it that way, but as we saw today for example, in the houses of
Congress, in the Longworth House Office Building, there was a large group...who
came to hear about the importance of stress reduction and its impact on
health and reduced medical costs. And a lot of the research, in fact most
of the research on stress management has been done on transcendental meditation,
and what we saw from the response of the audience today, that increasingly
over the past year, is more and more openness to new approaches that work.

Now for example gravity,
the force of gravity, is something we all take for granted--we utilize
every day--in fact it holds us down. But that was really an English discovery
with Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton and we've come to accept gravity as something
that belongs to all of us. Similarly, stress management, including transcendental
meditation, is not foreign. It simply takes advantage of the innate capabilities
of the human nervous system to gain deep rest at will. So taking advantage
of something that may have been discovered in India thousands of years
ago in the U.S. today has a long political history. In fact politics is
really science-based. There's a habit of the government taking advantage
of new technologies, new scientific breakthroughs that come from science.
Transcendental meditation is no different.

But for most American
mainstream political thought the Constitution is a basic starting point.
Do you have that as a basic starting point?

Yes, I think the U.S. Constitution
is the most inspired foundational political document that's ever been written.
I don't treat it as scripture. I think Thomas Jefferson was right. He said--[it's]
in the Jefferson Memorial here--that as human knowledge evolves and as
human society grows there will be newer and better ideas that may ultimately
supplant some of the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. Remarkably, over
the last couple hundred years though it has stood up very well and the
number of amendments have been relatively few. But I'm not afraid of amendments
if amendments are needed; I just wouldn't take that route lightly or ill-advisedly.

Is it simplistic or false
to refer to the Natural Law Party as the "transcendental meditation party?"

That wouldn't be accurate
at all. Only 2-percent of our registered party membership, approximately,
practice transcendental meditation, as far as we can tell. Others have
been attracted to the party for its strong environmental stance, its pro-growth
and yet very compassionate economic stance, its preventative medicine and
sustainable agriculture, strong stances against genetic engineering, for
example. So there are 1,001 reasons people would be attracted to this party.
Especially the 60 million Americans who call themselves cultural creatives,
who are involved with either environmental issues, holistic or alternative
medicine, responsible investing, sustainability in agriculture, energy
renewability--all these people--and now we're talking about the majority
of voters--these constitute more than half of all U.S. voters--look to
the Natural Law Party increasingly as their voice because who else speaks
for them? Not the Republicans and the Democrats.